Guru Venkatesan

CEO & Co-Founder SimpliContract

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Guru Venkatesan is CEO and co-founder of SimpliContract, an AI-native contract management platform he started in early 2020 with Jinaraj PG and Makesh Kumar. The company’s position is that a contract is not a document to be filed but a set of obligations, prices, renewal dates and risks that keep running after signature — and that most organisations lose money simply because nobody is reading them. SimpliContract uses AI and natural language processing to extract that structure, both at authoring and, more distinctively, after the signature. Its material is aimed squarely at procurement teams, on themes like unmonitored price indexation and agreements exposed to rising energy costs, and its customers include Reckitt. Venkatesan reached it after roughly 26 years in enterprise technology, most of it spent building channel and partner businesses at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded SimpliContract in early 2020 with Jinaraj PG and Makesh Kumar; named CEO & Co-Founder on the company’s own About Us page as of September 2026.
• Raised a $1.8 million seed round led by Kalaari Capital, announced in June 2021.
• Reported at that point that the platform already supported more than 4,000 enterprise users and managed over 30,000 contracts worth more than $2 billion.
• Built roughly 26 years of enterprise-technology experience before founding the company, including channel and alliances leadership at Amazon Web Services and channel development at Microsoft.
• Earlier served as a director at Tecknodreams Software Consulting in India.
• Leads a company whose customers include Reckitt and whose executive team now also includes Makesh Kumar as CPO and co-founder and Ed Berger as Chief Growth Officer.

Professional Journey

Venkatesan’s career before SimpliContract was built on the partner side of enterprise software rather than on the product side. Aggregator records place him as a director at Tecknodreams Software Consulting in India, then as Director of Channel Development at Microsoft and later as Head of Channels and Alliances at Amazon Web Services. Funding coverage corroborates the employers and the span — around 26 years across companies including Microsoft and AWS — without confirming the exact titles. It is a background in how enterprise software actually reaches large buyers, which shows in a company that sells to procurement functions rather than to legal departments alone.

SimpliContract was founded in early 2020 with two co-founders: Jinaraj PG, an engineering entrepreneur, and Makesh Kumar, who had built product lines at Microsoft. The three split the company along familiar lines, with Venkatesan taking the chief executive role. The product set out to democratise contract authoring while establishing what the company called post-signature contract management practice — the part of the lifecycle where value leaks, and the part most contract software had historically ignored.

Kalaari Capital led a $1.8 million seed round announced in June 2021. By then the platform had found early traction, and Venkatesan’s comment at the time put it at more than 4,000 enterprise users managing over 30,000 contracts with a combined value above $2 billion, crediting the interface, the AI capabilities and the ease of integration. Later rounds have been reported by business databases but could not be confirmed against news coverage in this review.

The company has since sharpened its positioning toward AI. It now brands its platform mNemoAI and describes contracts as living business systems rather than static documents, publishing material aimed at procurement teams on price indexation, energy-cost exposure and unlocked contract value. Reckitt is named among its users. The current executive team listed by the company is Venkatesan as CEO and co-founder, Makesh Kumar as CPO and co-founder, and Ed Berger as Chief Growth Officer.

Education

No education record could be established from any named source. The previous version of this profile listed an institution and a field of study with no degree, sourced only to business databases; it has been removed rather than repeated.